Matters of Public Record: Rich Resource for Reporters

Dr. Carlo Croce is a prominent cancer research scientist at Ohio State University.CreditCreditGreg Ruffing/Redux

By Susan Lehman

March 9, 2017

Back from Jerusalem, where he served as interim bureau chief from April to July of last year, the Times investigative reporter James Glanz was interested in doing a “cool story about cancer.”

Dr. Carlo Croce, a prolific cancer research scientist, came to his attention — along with allegations that Dr. Croce had falsified data in research he financed with more than $86 million in federal grants. Mr. Glanz’s interest led to the front-page story about Dr. Croce and his employer, Ohio State University, which reaped millions of dollars from the grants. The story raises questions about science and who is in the best position to police scientific endeavors.

It is also, as Mr. Glanz says, a story about open records and their value to an investigative reporter, and the public.

“Ohio is paradise for open documents,” Mr. Glanz said, meaning that all state records, from the Buckeye State’s courthouses as well as its university system, are open to anyone who wants to look. And Ohio State, which said it had spent more money supporting Dr. Croce’s research than it had received in grants, was nonetheless responsive to requests for records about Dr. Croce and his work.

Beginning in December, documents appeared in Mr. Glanz’s email inbox, in what Agustin Armendariz, who worked with Mr. Glanz, calls three big dumps.

Mr. Glanz and Mr. Armendariz have both worked on assignments that involved document requests that went exactly nowhere; but here, as Mr. Armendariz says, “the documents arrived, and lights just started shooting out of the box.”

Surveying the documents, Mr. Glanz saw that there had been more investigations into Dr. Croce’s work than the reporters knew. And that the university had investigated Dr. Croce and repeatedly cleared him of wrongdoing. Ohio State also confirmed that Dr. Croce had received $852,759 in total compensation from the university in 2015 — a number they found online.

“That struck us as a big number,” said Mr. Armendariz, who added that “$852,759 would likely go a long way in Columbus, Ohio.” Mr. Armendariz said the figure supplied another indication of Dr. Croce’s value to the university. A far fuller story than the reporters had imagined now lay before them.

“It almost never happens that you get confirmation like we did here,” said Mr. Glanz, “and it’s very exciting when it does.”

In a campus interview and a statement issued by his legal team, Dr. Croce denied that he — or anyone in the lab he oversaw — intentionally falsified data or otherwise breached rules of scientific conduct. Questions, however, remained: How exactly, for example, given its financial connection with Dr. Croce’s work, could Ohio State conduct a disinterested investigation into Dr. Croce?

Mr. Glanz’s reporting led to another trove of useful public documents: the Tobacco Control Archives, records on tobacco industry practices maintained by the University of California, San Francisco, which are open to the public. Those records revealed Dr. Croce’s association with the Council for Tobacco Research, an organization that, a federal court found, played a central role in a conspiracy to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking. Mr. Glanz noted that Dr. Croce’s name had been used to support tobacco company witnesses who questioned the connection between smoking and cancer. (Dr. Croce has said that long before he joined the council he believed that smoking caused cancer, and that he did not know his name had been used in this way.)

Familiar now with the new information and allegations about Dr. Croce’s work, Mr. Glanz went to Ohio State and inquired about scientific practices there and about who was in the best position to police scientific standards. In response, the university decided to have a fresh look at allegations made against one of its biggest rainmakers, and it has organized an independent, external review.

Rarely do reporters encounter as few obstacles as they did in this case. “Here, everything just kept adding up,” Mr. Armendariz said. The story, he added, is a reminder of the importance of keeping public information where it belongs, open and accessible to the public.